Interfax: Russia is fated to become center of Christian world – priest

(Interfax – MOSCOW, July 1, 2013) Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplain, chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Synodal Department for Church and Society, said Russia is moving towards maximum self-reliance and must become the center of global Christianity.

“It is not accidental that many see Russia as a defender of Christian ideals and traditional moral values, as a country that provides a real alternative to the cult of the golden calf and to a suicidal understanding of what freedom is,” Chaplin writes in an article, published in the Rus Derzhavnaya newspaper on Monday.

Russia must start feeling it is the center of the Christian world, he writes. Only if it does will it become an accomplished nation. The rest is “first, petty and, second, self-destructive for it,” Father Vsevolod said.

“Russia has told the world in clipped terms that it can definitely speak its own language, the language of a self-sufficient and strong nation, whose traditions and experience give it the right to walk its own way, to defend its own ideas of how society should be set up, and also to offer it to the world,” Chaplin said.

However hard one tried to influence the state into following the opinions of narrow groups that link themselves to foreign trends and position themselves as the mouthpiece of “would-be Russia”, or “other Russia,” or “real Russia, nothing worked, he said.

“It is not accidental that we said in clear terms despite pressure coming from the West that we do want to protect children from early sexualization and from the propaganda of homosexuality. And we also said that support for foreign adoptions of Russian children is an extremely irrational step. We do not want these children, adopted by perverts, to lose the hope in which many of them were christened, and to lose a normal life,” Father Vsevolod said.